> If you'd rather walk out from a room (or worse), than be able to settle your difference with some other presumably educated people, than this "pragmatic" value sounds like very arguable.

You're talking about ideals. I mean pragmatic in a sense that regardless of opinion, wants, idealization, "reality" has certain characteristic that are apathetic but work and all that matters is that they work. You're a few steps ahead of me if you're already filtering out human beings based on education level or mental capacity.

I'm not sympathizing with world leaders but world leaders walk out the room and room walks out with them. Example, the scientists screaming about climate change and people ignoring them.

>People aren't killing themselves over the different interpretations of quantum mechanics. Or the best music, or the best tastes of ice cream.

>But over us vs them straw men dressed up as "values" by wicked individuals.

It's complicated and it's all tied together. There are principles at play that we must reflect on but must be careful to act on. It's like looking at a mirror. As soon as you try to get closer or move away, whatever you're looking at also changes. This ties to the correlation/correspondence found in theories of truth.

There's truth to saying that life is nasty, brutish, short. An inescapable quality of living.

>Criminalizing "being" (let alone somehow having to discard objective reality in name of any moral consideration) sounds a lot like dogma you know.

In the sense I'm saying it, being has consequences to others. It's not criminalizing being. It's criminalizing taking meaning for granted and instead encouraging sympathizing with others and what meaning means to them. As long as this sympathizing makes for a better community (defined as less suffering, etc).

>They aren't talking about the concept of "not knowing". Like, I don't have an opinion on rocket science, so whatever NASA should do in the next decade is undefined from my pov. And I thus shut up.

>They are talking about handwaving. You build your argument through a crescendo of negative rhetoric.. and then you just move on when instead you should explain the way it actually would not be possible for the original idea to make sense.

Knowing and not knowing are intimately tied. We must have ideals and expectation of what righteous ignorance is (eg, you deciding to stay silent during certain interchanges) and what kind of other ignorance is there. The handwaving is relevant to making the greater concept of "knowing" more impactful. Again the example of climate scientists. Climate scientists are handwaving because the audience is not receptive to their legitimate claim to the kingdom of climate epistemology. The audience is not righteously ignorant. The question is how do we make/encourage better audiences that know when to stay silent.

>identified as "agnostic"

I'm talking about before identity comes into play. Identity is one of the three laws of logic/thought. I'm talking about a meta-analysis (such as "three laws of logic" that acknowledge identity within an identity already made).

In the meta-analysis, identity is contingent and unknown but follows certain principles (eg, correlation, verificationism, correspondence theory of truth). You've already gone through this. I'm just re-stating it because we agree in a lot.

>they hold sacred are very likely already proficient in epistemology.

I'm not saying they may be aware of their own agnosticism. Rather, agnosticism is something they implicitly accept by continuing their association in such a community. They may not know this is what it's called. For example, New York in the early 20th century. A lot of different cultures congregating and maintaining their own identity while collectively giving New York an identity of its own. This identity wasn't entirely defined but it didn't need to be to be.

>What I am saying is that I empirically have black hair. I have personally measured this and so have many other people who have informally seen me. I may tell you in this thread that I have black hair, and you most likely will accept my claim without further investigation. You don't accept the blackness of my hair because I'm some arbiter of truth. You accept that I have black hair because you have experienced having hair and seeing black hair. You've experienced both ideas empirically. There is no need to scrutinize simple observations which we relate to in reality because many are already shared experiences.

I don't disagree entirely while wishing to highlight the part where there is a continuous, perpetual construction of truth that is justified by its pragmatic value. As we walk down these philosophical halls together, we see the door marked "Utilitarianism" but we leave it closed for now.

The importance of acknowledging the pragmatic aspect is where we get stuck. And I think you alluded to this. We get stuck in analysis paralysis, neuroticism, an ouroboros, a mobius loop.

But getting stuck is not all bad. Sometimes it's validly pragmatic to get stuck. Like an art gallery where there is an open basis for analysis. Where various analyses, maybe even some that contradict each other, may be pragmatic. Or using Rorshack tests for therapy. Or again art but the kind of art that is banned in certain contexts because it threatens the authority.

Or the current political climate of "wokeness" where previously subjugated people gained a platform (internet) where they could gather and unionize against the bourgeoisie, who were and continue to be the arbiters of many "truths." Your hair being black or someone's skin being red become more that just mere, unquestionable correlation (pigmentation tied with color palettes). They potentially become political. An Aryan ideal of blondness, a football team's name become offensive. Truth becomes propaganda. Or rather, truth sheds its outer layer to reveal that it was always propaganda to some degree.

>"other forms of knowing" is just a blanket term with nothing defined, because there is no other form of actually reliably knowing without empiricism.

I'm not in disagreement with your stance thus far. Ironically, my contention started with the above quote (that I may have read wrong). "Nothing defined" is significant, non-trivial, politically relevant.

Dogma is intimately tied with knowledge, just of the illogical, unrevealed kind. I'm saying that no knowledge can exist in the motley crew because they can't verify/justify it to each other because they each have different experiences. Maybe there can be overlap in some cases, but as an alternative to your kind of dogmatism, I would say that they exist in a continuous stream of agnosticism. Can they not? And in this stream of ignorance, knowledge is revealed by contingency rather than absolutes.

How can you know a stranger or know about a stranger or assume what a stranger is capable of? Tying this to ideals which justify multicultural societies that must tolerate indefiniteness within the grandeur society they all share.

I think we all accept a sort of apathetic attitude to getting to know our neighbors sometimes to justify living next to people we don't know/assume too much about. Or have no expectations of them. And this apathy rests on agnosticism rather than any knowledge. Although I can see a way out if we argue that we agree to definite laws that let us know the person next door is very likely not capable of doing anything too bad.

> just a blanket term with nothing defined

Can't a room of 10 people with varying life experiences, different cultural background, different education level, intellectual capacity coexist with somethings not defined?

Nice, respect.

>because he puts his money where his mouth is

In what way? Really don't know this part about him.

I don't know, but it's a better starting point than "God is our foundation and supports all our actions." I'd rather us all start together as animalness or humanness as a common denominator rather than divine tribal/cultural divide.

It's funny because I literally came to this tab from a similar read: https://old.reddit.com/r/Guattari/comments/y0ywmw/to_code_or_not_to_code/. It's also funny in the Kafka-sense of the word, used ironically to mean terror.